Don's Life Passes By
by colonellunchmeat
Summary: Hotshot exec in 1964, in 2019 Draper's eighty-nine years old, he's had a stroke, and he's getting visitors, but of course he views them more as vultures circling the carcass. Damn, Campbell's gotten obese!
1. Chapter 1

God, Campbell's fat. And his hair, what there is of it, is dead white. Those huge lips of his...he looks like a beached whale.

Pete Campbell smiled indulgently at the prone Don Draper. He looked at Sally. "When did the stroke happen?." He looked at Sally meaningfully, leaning across Don's bed to take her hand. "This man was my mentor."

What bullshit. He tried to expose me in '61.

Sally dispassionately squeezed Campbell's limp-fished paw. "It was about two months ago. For eighty-nine, Dad was doing really well."

Pete Campbell moved a little closer to Sally, till they were face to face at the foot of Don's bed.

Jesus, Campbell, why don't you just try and fuck my daughter on the bed? Roll over on me, for God's sake.

Death, take me now. Don thought of his father, Archibald Whitman, who met his a end when he was kicked in the head by a horse. It's doubtful Archie was even forty at the time, though he looked terrible then.

"I understand you are in the medical profession yourself." Pete tried to take Sally's hand again, but she was using it to scratch her nose.

"Yes, but not here." Sally said, looking around at Don's room at St. Vincent's disparagingly. "I'm an E/R physician in Detroit. But I've been taking time off, though I really should get back."

Pete Campbell surveyed Sally Draper with barely contained glee. Having lived the past forty years in Wichita, his opportunities for amour were few. He'd moved from New York, left advertising altogether, in the hope that he could be a better helpmate.

But it takes two to tango, and Trudy had taken Tammy and moved back to Cos Cobb after a misunderstanding with Tammy's babysitter. Peter should have let the little bitch get her own ride home.

Pete's second and third wives had not been up to the mark either. Now, in his seventies, he was still a virile man, the EST training had so helped...

Sally was in her mid fifties, but looked so...promising.

Sally and her father exchanged a look that said volumes. Don couldn't do anything but move his eyes, but their opinions of the geriatric visiting Casanova were entime.

Sally stuck her tongue out at her father, and Don wished he could grin.


	2. Chapter 2

Sally watched the back of Pete Campbell's very broad buttocks as he waddled out of Dad's hospital room. He always was the scummiest of the old man's colleagues-except maybe for Harry Crane.

Sally had been interning at St. Vincent's when she'd heard from Bobby (was it '75?) that he and Gene, the youngest sib, had overheard Don disgustedly turning down an invitation to a "key party".

This had been hosted by Harry Crane, when Harry had moved back from California to live with his second or third wife in Westchester.

"It was phenomenal, Sal." Bobby had been so excited about this. "These old squares have a party and put all their car keys-each couples-in a communal brandy glass, right? And then people take them out blindfolded and whoever's keys you have?"

"I get it" Sally had responded boredly. "You go upstairs with that person. So scummy."

"Right, so Gene and I sneaked into Crane's house and stole the brandy glass with the keys in it, and we took all the cars, except for one DeSoto, or was it a Rambler? Our friends helped."

This had inspired the boys to go on a heroin-and-burglary binge...not much wonder being raised by Dad-Uncle William had flaked after Mom's death and refused to take them.

Bobby finally had found Jesus and was a drug counselor somewhere, but Gene "The Glove" Draper had spent the past forty years breaking into houses, and had gone from the reform school at Warwick through a bunch of other playpens

"The Glove" was now in his seventeenth year of incarceration in Sing Sing, ironically situated in the town where he'd been born.

Could Sally blame Crane for her brothers malfeasance and their continuing crises? Bobby was a religious nut, but he'd been fired from two mental hospitals where he'd been counseling, for playing grab-ass with the patients.

"Manic depressives are very selfish in bed." Bobby had confided.

What kind of family was this? It's almost as if Dad was punished for abandoning Dick Whitman's identity and stealing Don Draper's!

On the other hand, Gene's daughter, who Sally had raised from age four to nineteen (when the kid became lead singer in a band entitled "Seismic Shift") was a true joy...so the Drapers couldn't be counted out yet, right?

Much as Sally loathed Pete Campbell, she was relieved that there would probably be no more visits. Everyone else was long dead. Of course Margaret, Roger Sterling's flaky kid had come a few weeks before.

Sally had come in from Starbucks, and what did she see, right there in the damn hospital room? Margaret screaming at Don's prone figure as he lay there in the bed, with nurses freaking out.

"Don't you realize that your father corrupted my father, and they both corrupted us?" Margaret had shrieked at Sally.

You're nearly seventy, bitch. Get off the cross, we need the wood.


End file.
